The court ruled that there is insufficient evidence to prove that "Levitating" is a copycat.
A court has serious doubts about a lawsuit that claims Dua Lipa's smash hit "Levitating" is a rip-off of a little-known reggae song, noting it has seen no evidence the singer heard the song she's accused of copying.
The band Artikal Sound System sued Dua Lipa last year, claiming that her song 'Levitating', which was released in 2020 and spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, borrowed its main hook from their song 'Live Your Life'. which was released in 2017.
But in a ruling issued Monday, June 5, U.S. District Judge Sunshine S. Sykes said there was no indication that those involved in the creation of "Levitating" had "access" to the earlier song — a key requirement in any lawsuit for Copyright.
Artikal Sound System put forward a complicated theory: that one of Dua Lipa's co-creators had previously worked with a woman who had allegedly learned guitar from a band member's brother-in-law. But in her ruling, Judge Sykes appeared unconvinced by Artikal Sound System's arguments.
"These tenuous links, which have little to do with either of the two musical compositions at issue here, also do not suggest a reasonable possibility that defendants actually encountered plaintiffs' song," the judge wrote.
The band also claimed that the song was so widely available that the creators of "Levitating" must have heard it, citing the fact that it had been played in concert, that they had sold "several hundreds" of physical CDs and that it was available on some streaming platforms .
But Judge Sykes stressed that those arguments were "too general or too trivial" to support a lawsuit.
"Plaintiffs' failure to identify how often they performed 'Live Your Life' in public during the particular period, where those concerts took place, and the size of the venues and/or audiences does not allow the Court to find that the live performances of the song by plaintiffs reasonably contributed to its saturation in the markets in which defendants would encounter it," the lawsuit noted.
On a technicality, the court dismissed the lawsuit against Dua Lipa. But the case is not over: the judge ruled that Artikal Sound System could try to fix the mistakes she had identified and file an amended lawsuit.
'Levitating', which was released in 2020 on Dua Lipa's second album, 'Future Nostalgia', was a massive hit. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and set the record for the longest-running Top 10 song by a female artist.
Artikal Sound System is a South Florida-based reggae band that formed in 2012 as a duo, before later adding additional musicians and vocalist Logan Rex to their lineup. The band released 'Live Your Life' on the 'Smoke and Mirrors' EP in 2017.
In the lawsuit they filed in March 2022, Artikal Sound System said the songs sounded so similar that it was "extremely unlikely that 'Levitating' was created independently."
But in November 2022, Dua Lipa's lawyers filed a series of counterarguments that were largely adopted in Monday's ruling, claiming that the band's efforts to prove that Dua Lipa or the other creators had heard "Live Your Life" they were "excruciating" and "nothing more than speculation."
"Plaintiffs are essentially trying to plead access, alleging that someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone may have met one of the creators of 'Levitating,'" Dua Lipa's legal team wrote.
Following Monday's ruling, Artikal Sound System has until June 16 to file an amended lawsuit.
